


i might brave the fire til the feeling hits

by paintedviolet



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Body Swap, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Originally Posted on Tumblr, References to past companions, Telepathy, Tumblr Prompt, a couple of aliens, angry!13, at the recommendation of a commenter, repost from my thasmin prompts fic, yaz just needs to be given a break
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 10:36:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20152234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paintedviolet/pseuds/paintedviolet
Summary: Escape should not be so convoluted; so emotionally draining. But travelling with the Doctor has its downsides - for the Doctor, as much as anyone else.Even in the mires of another planet's war, there is a past come back to haunt them. All Yaz can try to do is survive it.(Originally posted on 'more of the universe', based on a Tumblr prompt. Work title and all chapter titles taken from 'Closure' by Vancouver Sleep Clinic.)





	1. make or miss

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt: Thought I'd take a chance and throw out a Thasmin prompt. an accident involving a teleport and the TARDIS freaky fridayish but they have access to each other feelings and memories 😁**
> 
> okay i know this was meant to be a light-hearted prompt but i've been challenging myself, recently, to push for darker and more deeper writing. so. congrats you got angst. i hope that's alright. i had a lot of fun writing this though so i hope that makes up for any disappointment.
> 
> also, throughout this whole fic, there are three songs you can switch between: ['so close'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcg1ubkAeo) and ['suspects'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVNI1dEO6Cc) from the broadchurch soundtrack _(yes i know it's a completely different story but the music's vibe is so perfect okay)_ and ['closure'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZhMBH6eQj8) by vancouver sleep clinic.
> 
> [all of these can be found on my spotify playlist for this fic.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5v8GPtBFpbISKEMKWbPoIb?si=KH0TVy20SaqqFpleTSu9xQ)
> 
> Jtrack2 suggested i put this in a separate fic, and yeah, that was the right decision. thanks, pal!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> part i, featuring: the darker side of travelling with the doctor, spider-like humanoids are the friendliest ones on this planet, somehow, and yaz just does not want to let go of the doctor.

Every step is a beckoning. It doesn’t help them.

Lately, Yaz has found herself wondering about how dead inside the action heroes are on the films back home. Eyebrows furrowed, dead thin lines for mouths, every limb fluid only to run, to jump, to pull a trigger.

How do they not cry? How do they not bluster and fluster and fall? Why don’t they grip onto each other when the going gets tough – really tough?

Ryan and Graham have each cried three times in the last hour. They’re the bravest men Yaz knows.

(Films are a lie.)

Explosions and gunshots are a constant shock to the system for a trio not brought up in war. Their deafening nearer, louder. Yaz has squeezed the Doctor’s hand more times she can count. Even after all they’ve witnessed together, after seeing all the bodies that have littered their journey through this planet, Yaz finds refuge in the Doctor. Every time. She has held on tightly that she is at risk of melding their bones together; but then, at least, there would be less flesh to locate, to target, to shoot.

Sight, not sound, betrays them. Every step is a beckoning, so they do their best to float. Silent breaths flee in bewildered spirals: everything pained to be anything but reluctant.

Yaz can see goosebumps on her forearm, the sleeve of her hoodie only pushed back to prevent any more bloodstains. She will not groan for fear of discovery. Winces are all impassion. She has too much passion.

At least the Doctor’s hand is warm in hers. Hood up, grey-white and spoiled red against the rust red rock, she leads the way; they must follow the ripped coattails, so sure on this trembling planet.

‘She’s got to be around here somewhere,’ she mutters, almost merely mouths. More to herself or to her friends, there is no indication.

Time is the first victim that war’s first bullet claims. War devours history – arrogant, starved – and feasts on futures for dessert. This place lost time long ago; it is up to them to find it.

Madness.

A shot, then a snarl. Must be a foot soldier, prowling. ‘Sniff out the fear and find the traitors,’ they’d heard all around them. Yaz is terrified that fear will fail them, but it wafts off them in waves. Every step into the unknown is a beckoning. Every step is a step into ending.

The Doctor dives behind the nearest free-standing rock and slams herself into it; they obediently press themselves against its jaggedness and pray to gods they do or don’t believe in.

They do not breathe.

There is no point in breathing.

‘Breathing is death; all is death,’ so the saying goes here. If they are to achieve the impossible – to defy all – then something as obvious as breathing would be a fool’s mistake.

Unfortunately, breathing is generally essential for survival, and Yaz can feel her lungs bursting with the effort to contain the carbon dioxide building up.

Graham is going red as the rock that might save him.

A vein has started bulging in Ryan’s neck.

The Doctor is fine.

The soldier marches on, the two-beat rhythm quieting. Until the only rhythms they hear are their own accelerated heartbeats.

Exhalation has never been sweeter. Or more silent. Yaz feels fuzzy and everything looks the same sort of red. The Doctor is fine. She helps Yaz to her feet and her gentle grip, slender fingers on the hook of Yaz’s elbow, is central to everything.

‘You’re doing amazing,’ the Doctor whispers, hazel-green piercing into Yaz amongst the burnt blaze.

The words are so close that Yaz almost inhales them. She stutters in her breath. Doesn’t want to let go, even though it doesn’t help her worldly disorientation. She nods, somehow.

The Doctor switches her attention to the two men, and gestures to them manically. ‘Come on, we’ve got to keep going,’ she adds, and this, too, is more a shape than a sentence.

They move on.

Steps beckon.

The Doctor’s hand trails from Yaz’s elbow, via the underside of the woman’s arm, to her hand, and squeezes. Yaz is shaking off her unworldliness but that touch still feels the most important thing.

One squeeze against countless. The inside pounding seems to be in harmony with the relentless outside world. How Yaz wishes all the relentless stayed only inside their adrenaline.

A shot blasts off, a shot at someone, which lands in painstaking acknowledgement. The world does not shudder. There is no one else to perform the civilian’s ‘Last Post’ except themselves; no melody but the cry, no trumpet but the voice.

Yaz can hear Ryan’s reaction – something halfway between a grunt and a whimper. Graham whispers to his grandson, a wheeze of a sound, but even then he cannot hide the tremble in his voice.

Yaz reaches out for Ryan, finds the teeth of the zip on his jacket, and bunches the material in her hand. Ryan’s hand makes easy the uneasy job to hold on – human warmth is preferable to cold material – and Graham completes the line.

She turns her torso to face her friends. ‘You okay?’

They both nod. ‘You?’ Ryan asks.

‘No,’ is her reply, but there is nothing to say to it, so they don’t try.

Still they trudge on, shielded by cliff edge and rock structures. Shapes of stone and earth make this a labyrinth; they are yet to discover whether the promise of escape is just an illusion.

The Doctor didn’t flinch. Wars have gorged on time.

Yaz wonders – after the death in their movements on the battlefields, where do the heroes go to cry?

Yaz wonders – where does the Doctor go?

They turn a corner as another shot rings out. The laser hits the rock next to Graham and he jumps, yelps.

‘Run, Doc, faster!’ The ground melts beneath Graham’s footprints as he shouts and scatters. Quiet has failed them, so all, once again, is death. Graham is still defiant.

The Doctor gasps. ‘We found it! In there, go!’ She points her hand to her north-east, and ducks her body as they scamper in that direction.

Yaz yanks Ryan forward – his stumble, loud, is enough to yank Graham closer, closer to an opening inside the cliff they had not spotted before.

Disappearance is not death; they have defied it.

There are no lights for the disappeared, the unconsidered, so the Doctor procures her sonic screwdriver and keeps a steady finger on its side. Its glow unearths an ice-cold cave: there is frost forming, stalagmites and icicles spreading over each other. Red in colour; blazed by the orange of the alien light, they look aflame. Burning ice wouldn’t be the strangest thing on this planet.

The lack of the fire’s grumble banishes the illusion to folly. Instead, the buzzing bounces off of walls to greet them more cacophonously than ever before, and Yaz’s wince evolves into irritation.

She hears Ryan groan at the sudden sound, and he lets go of her.

‘Hello?’ the Doctor calls out.

‘Doc!’ Graham immediately hisses, and the Doctor turns around to blink at him in bewilderment. He’s standing to the side of the cave entrance, shaded from the light of the outside world. He and Ryan have released themselves of held hands to favour recovery from the sprint. ‘What’re you doing?’

‘You’re gonna get us killed!’ Ryan adds.

‘No, no, I promise, we’re quite safe now,’ the Doctor shakes her head, ‘as long that soldier hasn’t followed us.’ She stares at all three of them. ‘We’ll be leaving here soon, I promise.’

Her gaze lingers on the wound on Yaz’s arm, a scratch against enemy metal refusing to let up, and finally determination dissolves into remorse.

She takes off the hood with one arm and guides them deeper inside. Ryan and Graham follow, light treading.

Breath clouds in front of them all. The Doctor marches into her own mist. ‘Hello? It’s the Doctor. We came for a favour.’

They hear the sound of scuttling bouncing off the cave walls before the sonic illuminates the source. A Viba in hiding, her four insect legs struggling to find much purchase on the slippery rock ground. One leg slips, but she hurriedly rights herself. The clothes sewn around her humanoid torso are ripped with giant holes, but there are no injuries underneath. Perhaps they’ve healed, Yaz thinks. The planet has hidden her from certain death, for now.

The two parties take a moment to study the other. Yaz can see the details of the Viba’s sharp, jutting face. The bridge of her button nose flows into a wide brow; underneath, purple irises take up the entirety of the four eyes on show, and their pupils have receded in the sonic’s brilliant light. Her eyes narrow as she regards the four of them: inhuman blinking on a humanoid head – Yaz is reminded of cogs, working inside brains; a loading screen.

‘Plor,’ the Doctor addresses her. ‘It is Plor, yeah? Countess Plor. 3rd Andrun Battalion when you were 13.’

The Viba sniffs. Behind them, the soldier passes by the entrance of the cave, satisfied.

‘Doctor,’ Plor sighs. ‘You shouldn’t have come. Especially with them.’ Her head jerks towards the humans, visibly wounded and shaken, their lives dependent on the two aliens in front of them. Plor’s gaze drifts on the Doctor and Yaz, and the little space between them.

‘I thought that I – we – could help,’ the Doctor admits. Her shoulders slouch but the sonic is still pointed forward, a sagging angle at her elbow.

‘You thought wrong,’ Plor cuts her off.

‘Clearly,’ but the Doctor’s words have no bite, unlike Plor’s.

‘We did help, though, Doc,’ Graham protests, ‘we helped a bit.’

Plor’s four eyes pin him to the spot. ‘Yet the war still rages.’

Yaz’s gaze gravitates to a stalactite near the Doctor’s head, copper alight, and the film rolls before her eyes. Crystal palaces. Honour and family. A helping hand, running, jumping, shelter and laughter.

(Films lie. The silence was terrible.)

‘So now you’re running?’

The Doctor nods. ‘This isn’t their war to fight,’ and Plor blinks. The Doctor continues, ‘Have you got the teleporter still? Give me a couple of minutes to work on it, and we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.’ A drop of water echoes as Doctor considers the sight of her entirely hairless alien friend. ‘Or, you know. Cave.’

Another shout from outside reaches their ears.

Plor blinks.

‘Come.’

Steps beckon freedom. Yaz treads tentatively, careful not to ruin this blessing. The Doctor squeezes her hand again, a tense anticipation passing from Time Lord to human, and although their threat of death has been reduced since entering the cave, Yaz’s pulse is unrelenting.

It seems so loud in the silence.

They are rushed to another alcove deeper into the cave, where the sonic’s light becomes crowded by fire and alien technology. The Doctor detaches herself and is immediately magnetised towards the lengthy black box and the pedestal at the centre of the room, caressing her sonic over its edges. Both of the Viba mechanisms appear to be battered and aged, but still in working condition. Working enough for the Doctor’s eyes to light up again. The three humans stand in the corner, useless but alive.

They can breathe now. Yaz tries it.

She swears she’ll never be silent again.

‘Well?’ Plor, sliding over to the pedestal, crooks an eyebrow at the trio. ‘Stand on it.’

They comply. Yaz strangely feels like she is stood on a hangman’s box. She taps it with her left foot, ungainly in her sturdy boots, and it clangs resoundingly. Yaz remembers the wound in her right arm and winces.

The sound is met with a disgruntled hiss from Plor – it was a disturbance enough for the outside world to listen in on, Yaz realises; a call to forget defiance. She might as well have walked out of the cave alone. But it’s sight, not sound, that defeats them, so Yaz is repentant but unworried.

She looks up to Plor, to apologise, and spots her scratching incessantly, with long, unkempt nails, at a hairy patch on her left arm. A hair appears to be growing, in real time.

The Doctor looks over to Yaz with an apology in her eyes, but keeps her head down.

She takes only a minute more. Her persistent buzzing and a few keying in of commands on the pedestal’s interface has notified the TARDIS of their location, she explains. The TARDIS will take care of them.

The Doctor plants her feet next to Yaz once her commentary has finished. A low humming immediately starts; their feet are forced into immobility on the box. The Doctor’s boots have knocked against Yaz’s.

‘There’s room on the box for you, Plor,’ she says as the Viba types in more commands on the interface. It is a whole paragraph of typing; the Doctor looking on with her brow furrowed.

To the untrained ear there would be no sound but hope in the Doctor’s voice. Yaz can hear the remorse that threatens the Doctor’s determination, the thin line of a mouth that speaks of future death. And she knows Plor’s answer before she opens her mouth.

Plor nods her head, too busy typing to look up. It robs her voice of intonation. ‘My place is here, with the unconsidered. I am to them what you were to me, all those years ago. But thank you.’ She presses a button on the pedestal, and the process begins.

For a second Plor’s face contorts. To the untrained eye it would be sadness, but Yaz has seen enough war now to read the signs.

The box starts vibrating, the thrumming louder and louder. Plor looks at the Doctor’s friends. ‘This is old technology, long before the war. I cannot guarantee it won’t hurt. Brace yourselves, it won’t be long.’

‘Doctor, I don’t think—'

Yaz forgets how to breathe again. The thrumming becomes a whirring, and the sides of the box are suddenly aflush with white light – bright white light. She doesn’t want it to hurt. In the last moment before the transfer, they hear the _whoosh _of the TARDIS – and, on instinct, Yaz grabs the Doctor’s arm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> on a side note i finished the first season of broadchurch and let me tell you mark latimer ain't shit  
imagine marrying someone with a face like jodie's and then getting 'tired' of her like how  
beth latimer I'LL marry you


	2. sink or swim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Thought I'd take a chance and throw out a Thasmin prompt. an accident involving a teleport and the TARDIS freaky fridayish but they have access to each other feelings and memories 😁**
> 
> part ii, featuring: ryan and graham are Even More Confused Than Usual, the doctor is enjoying the conundrum far too much, and yaz and the doc get more gross obviously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again, throughout this whole fic, there are three songs you can switch between: ['so close'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcg1ubkAeo) and ['suspects'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVNI1dEO6Cc) from the broadchurch soundtrack; and ['closure'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZhMBH6eQj8) by vancouver sleep clinic.
> 
> [all of these can be found on my spotify playlist for this fic.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5v8GPtBFpbISKEMKWbPoIb?si=KH0TVy20SaqqFpleTSu9xQ)
> 
> **the doctor's thoughts are in italics, unless the italics are within dialogue.**

Her head pulses in time to the thrumming.

She thinks she groans, a sound of all the terror she’d wanted to scream – but if it fades away, then she’s not to blame. Plor did say it would hurt.

No. She said...

She refuses to open her eyes. The world spins and sways as it is; rollercoaster regret. She may start finally screaming.

She said she couldn’t guarantee it. Couldn’t guarantee no pain. No warning helps. Yaz refuses to open her eyes.

Does every teleport feel like this?

Physicality comes slow. First it is her head – only her head – available to her. The rest of her body makes itself known afterwards, an overall ache, as the seconds pass. The cool sensation of metal on her skin is seeping through now, an iciness measured in its pace. Goosebumps rising. Fingertips attached to meshed metal holes. Pleading.

She refuses to open her eyes.

Maybe if she put her head to the floor. Maybe the hurt would lessen. Maybe. The thought echoes in the damaged chamber; movement feels unrealised. But it happens. Cool metal and cooler relief, a joy so sharp it may cut into her skin. She concentrates all her energy on the metal. Relief, relief, safety.

Hair tickles her jaw.

And that’s new.

_What on—_

Her ears are still ringing, bells hailing the arrival of hurt, but the ringers are finishing up, she hopes. In half-formed thoughts, she prays to God that they will let go of their bell-ropes soon; that they will bow and congratulate themselves on a job well done. And, then, finally, they will leave. Leave her be. Leave her be.

Her head pounds. She aches to escape it.

She aches.

She doesn’t hear any screams. It’s likely that the others are okay. They might be coming over to her soon. For now, she keeps her eyes shut, bowed while the bell-ringers work; whispering under her breath for this, too, to pass, despite her lungs heaving, despite an emerging erraticism and the inside cacophony tearing to shreds any future sense of peace. Let her stop aching; go home, bell ringers, your deeds have been done, your defiance against death keenly felt; leave her in peace. She still has so much to do.

Her breaths are slow but her pulse isn’t. Curled up on the floor, the edge of life worship, almost, the erraticism is only more prevalent. Her calm actions all in vain.

But the breathing works. The bells fall silent; now is the time for movement. She hoists her right arm out from underneath her, a ginger movement, and lifts her torso by a well-hidden strength found in her flat palms and the strain of her biceps. Eyes closed, rising – eyes open, dizzy. Try again.

Eyes open, less dizzy. She aches.

The TARDIS’ warm glow has been replaced by a stark yellow. A warning? As it travels, it murmurs in a way Yaz has never heard before.

Or maybe she has. Wide open, dizzy. She no longer knows what she doesn’t know.

_No, no. Oh, no, no, no._

Graham is at her side in an instant. He’s pale, too; he breathes heavily, open-mouthed. Eyes open are yet hooded with exhaustion, but he blinks rapidly.

Yaz thinks he’s talking to her. Sorry. Be there in a bit. She tries to quieten the furious erraticism but nothing works.

The TARDIS witters. Graham eases himself into a crouch and repeats a word, a name, until she at least hears his worry.

‘Doc?’

There is hair skimming just below her jawline. In her fixation on the TARDIS, it didn’t register fully.

It is blonde. It is very definitively blonde hair.

She frowns. Did something go wrong? Did it bleach her hair? She’s never heard of that.

Coughs rack her body – a bout, a beating – and she folds over herself. There it is again, that erraticism. Made worse by her coughing. It’s making her anxious. Like her heart can’t calm. It’s not a panic attack – it feels different to a panic attack, as if it’s inherent, not simply out of control. The difference is that she’s dealt with panic attacks. But not this.

She makes the effort to keep her breaths steady – just in case she’s wrong. She doesn’t want to give the attack an extra kick into gear. The situation is stressful enough as it is.

Blonde hair! And not all of it down, either.

The bell-ringers have returned only to settle in her very bones. Tense; she’s tense now. Different to pain but still painful. Still a consequence. Alarm bells, alarm bells.

It doesn’t make sense. Surely if it escaped her space buns, then it should be falling down by her side. Touching the floor, even.

She can only see it around her jaw. Blonde and short. She reaches a hand behind her back, searches around her shoulder blades. It doesn’t even reach there.

Yaz’s heart drops.

All around them, the TARDIS whines.

_I think I know what’s happened._

Her nose is pink. And that’s really very new.

And she looks up.

She’s always wondered what it would be like, to see herself through the eyes of someone else. In a sense of perspective, yes, sure, but to see herself existing, without the self-awareness of existing...

Being removed from her body entirely. Letting herself be seen.

She didn’t think she’d be so chilled by it.

Her body sits a few paces away from her. Sat up, resting her hands on knees, legs splayed out like a child about to attempt a teddy bear roll. The face is pushed into such an expression that it looks almost crumpled. Mildly put-out by a teleportation gone wrong. Her thick long black hair hasn’t broken free of the space buns, though a few strands escape. The rest of her hair still trails down, but some is caught in static by the transfer. Yaz sees herself inspect her right forearm; the gash exposed. She’s battered; needlepoint pains and patchy bruises flaring.

She looks down to the right arm of this current body she inhabits – and, yes, look. No wound.

_It’s been a long time since I drew blood_, she hears – only, that wasn’t her thought, that wasn’t her mind’s voice at all, and Yaz finally understands.

She finally understands.

Oh, wow.

‘Doc?’ Graham asks again.

Yaz thinks she shakes her head. Give her a moment. Please, please. She needs a moment to breathe. To... comprehend.

Maybe it’s the way her body is positioned, but there’s a vulnerability to her form Yaz never saw her before. Or maybe, Yaz _didn’t _want to see before. Perspective is the universe’s great eye-opener.

She just looks so human. She can’t get over it. Of all things, she’s so human. Bleeding and unbelonging and so very human.

Yaz can’t stop watching herself.

(She wonders how many films would change track if the protagonists just saw themselves like this. She wonders how many reckless sacrifices, how many needless deaths, would be prevented. She wonders how long this planet would be warring for – if it was enough to asphyxiate that strange hate fire that seems to consume them all.)

She wonders, the bell-ringers frantic, if she’ll ever return back to herself.

There are foreign thoughts in her head going at three thousand miles per hour, so fast and complicated she can’t decipher them. The barrage of sound doesn’t help the pounding of her head, though it is decreasing, little by little. She closes her eyes for a second, and it helps. But peace does not last long here.

‘Yaz?’ she hears the worry in Ryan’s voice and she aches a little. It’s a way off from the centre of her thoughts, her conscience, and directed towards her moving body instead.

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m good.’ She hears it in her own voice, but that wasn’t her response. It is strange hearing exactly how her voice sounds to other people – without that internal resonance, she almost doesn’t recognise it.

Graham helps her sit up gingerly, and Yaz nods up at him in thanks. Much better than being sprawled, reckoned. Her hands lock once more around the holes of the TARDIS floor, desperate for the cool relief of home. She’ll gather her strength from her, ask her for guidance when trying to make sense of the sight in front of her.

_They still think I’m in my own body. Right. This is gonna be interesting._

_Yaz! _The thought is so sudden, so emphatic – the head on Yaz’s body snaps up to look at Yaz dead in the eyes – that it takes them both by surprise. They lock eyes with each other – and it’s worse – suddenly it’s like a head injury and they both recoil. White light and exploding. Images, new images. New thoughts. New emotions. New memories.

Heads flung back; they cry out. Yaz closes her eyes upon instinct, but she sees images swirl around her that are not hers. She is held hostage, handcuffed by circumstance and expected to languish in it. These are the metal chafes around her wrist – the sharp pain, the pictures.

Memories of a Time Lord.

This is far too much for a human to comprehend. Millennia of memory. Faces of the young who have grown old and withered, whose heads have hit the floor with eyes unseeing. Interment and birth, constant rebirth. People she will never know and was never expected to. Falling in love and falling into grief. Planets that are long dust; some that are, at this moment, still forming.

Life in all of its echoes: every single thing played out before her eyes until it all loses original meaning. Some concepts solidified, if only out of necessity. Fear. Hope. Love.

Sunsets and orange skies. Grass blowing in such a heavenly breeze.

The Time Vortex, all that dangerous glistening. Just taunting her, no matter how close or far away; no matter how removed or embedded.

The beginning of the universe. The very end of it. All of the importance of the in between.

All of her. The Time Lord, the madman in a box. Husband and father and grandfather. The best friend, the cloaked figure uncloaked. The Hybrid and the Oncoming Storm and the Timeless Child.

Everything is almost too much. Her head hurts so much.

Yaz opens her eyes again and gasps a breath. It’s freeing. The barrage of information falters, slows down, like a roll of film running out; fades into the back of her head to file away.

‘Doc!’ Graham repeats again, refusing to let her collapse onto the ground entirely. ‘What’s happening, Doc?’

‘I have to—’ Yaz hears in her own voice. Yaz’s head snaps up to see herself crawling over, getting closer. ‘Memory transfer. Memory transfer. That means...’

Ryan follows the crawling Doctor, his frown become permanent. ‘Yaz, what you talking about?’

Seeing herself come so close is so jarring – so jarring it makes her sit up again. She knows it’s the Doctor in there, looking out for her. The Doctor settles against her, their legs just touching, supporting, with a sigh of relief, and Yaz doesn’t know what to do.

She just doesn’t know what to do. She’s never seen a mirror be so kind.

She watches her own hands take hold of the hands that move for her. The embrace is so gentle. The Doctor inspects them, fingertips trailing over cold pink palms. Turning them over, looking for the right signs. But Yaz is fine, really – just headachey.

‘That’s good,’ the Doctor murmurs in response, and the relief comes off her in waves.

Yaz breaks one of her hands free of the embrace and touches the area around her—the Doctor’s—forearm. ‘Does it hurt?’ she asks. The Doctor’s voice sounds deeper in these ears.

‘Yeah. Bit weird, to be honest.’ The Doctor pauses, considering. It’s an emotion, not an expressed thought, that courses through them now. There are no words to access, only a feeling, an acknowledgement of a certain cadence.

Anticipation. The two of them lock eyes again. Fear. And anticipation.

What—?

The Doctor takes the dive and brings up the hand she’s still holding to her lips. She kisses the fingers, then the back of her palm. It’s the first sign they see of the Doctor’s desperation. ‘I promise you; I’ll get us through this.’

In Yaz’s new chest, her two hearts flutter.

‘Seriously, though, what’s up with you two? Us lads are getting a bit left behind here,’ Graham says.

That snaps the Doctor into action. She shuffles into a different stance – a squat resting on the balls of her feet. Still holding onto Yaz’s hand. ‘Something definitely went wrong in that coding,’ the Doctor in Yaz’s body muses. ‘Though exactly _why_ is still puzzling me.’ She turns to the main crystal, gazes up at it. Yaz watches her own profile. ‘Was it you? And why didn’t Ryan and Graham get mixed up?’

The TARDIS bleeps with indignation.

‘Yaz?’ Graham says, looking at Yaz’s body when he says it. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Is something going on?’ Ryan wonders. Still crouched down by Yaz, he plants a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder and squeezes. ‘Doctor, what’s going on?’

_Signals, signals and paths, I need to find the signals of the codes. Can you do that for me, Sexy?_

The TARDIS is working as normal, from what Yaz can tell. She sounds disgruntled but not too much is out of place. Apparently it’s just her and the Doctor that are bringing trouble into the room.

Hold on. “Sexy”?

_Whoops._ The Doctor whips her head over to where Yaz is and looks sheepish. If her cheeks could blush, they would be now.

‘Yaz, can you help her up? Must’ve been something proper big if it knocked the Doctor out,’ Ryan says.

‘Ryan…’ Graham warns. ‘I don’t think that’s Yaz.’

The Doctor is still resting on the balls of her feet. She uses them to swivel to where Ryan stands, his head poking behind the crystal, his hand massaging his forehead.

‘Quick deducing!’ the Doctor exclaims. She switches her attention from Graham to Ryan. ‘Yes, sorry, should’ve updated you. I’m just so confused why only Yaz and I got affected. If there’s a problem with the teleport’s spatial code then it wouldn’t discriminate. It _was _meant to bring us here, wasn’t it?’

The Converses are gonna really feel that swivel, Yaz thinks; they’re only Primark knockoffs.

_Sorry, Yaz! _The Doctor turns her head to wince at her and it’s strange, it’s so _strange_, to see expressions that were never hers.

‘S’alright.’ She waves the apology off with her left hand, massages her head with it afterwards. As long as they get through this without too much pain. If they get through this.

Next to her, Ryan is blinking silently at the two of them, his mouth _just _open.

‘We will get through this, I swear,’ the Doctor repeats, all seriousness trained on her.

Yaz never got the chance to appreciate the richness of her own eye colour.

_They’re very pretty, Yaz_, the Doctor responds, and Yaz feels her – the Doctor’s – cheeks warm.

Ryan is still blinking at them.

‘Hey, you’re blushing,’ he notices. ‘The Doctor never blushes. Oh! Oh my God that _is _Yaz!’

‘Bit late, Ryan,’ Yaz says.

‘Well, at least that ain’t changed,’ Graham sighs. He’s shuffled closer to them now. ‘So are we gonna fix this or are you two just gonna flirt with each other all day?’

The Doctor takes a breath and immediately bounces up onto her feet. ‘Right, yes, sorry,’ she rushes. ‘Sorry. Graham, could you take a look at where we are? Should be shown on the console screen. Ryan, help me get Yaz up.’

As Graham lumbers over to the console, Ryan and the Doctor clasp their hands on the underside of Yaz’s—the Doctor’s—arms and firmly lift her. Yaz’s knees are still a little weak, her head dizzy, so she leans onto the Doctor for support. That feeling of safety is still just as warm. Yaz leans into it, gathers her strength from it.

She can smell the perfume she put on earlier today. That heavy hint of musk still not enough to hide the undertones of jasmine. She didn’t realise it lingered for that long. It’s mixed in there with something else that she’s never really smelled before – except, she realises, it’s a smell she recognises from Sonya, from her mum, her dad. Is that _her _smell? Is that what the Doctor always recognises whenever they hug?

Her head throbs again – there’s a flash of recollection, of memories that aren’t hers – and it becomes clear that they’ve been triggered by the smell. In her—_their_—mind’s eye, she sees their hugs. The Doctor remembers hugging Yaz so clearly, remembers the touch and feel of her, her natural scent and the way Yaz breathes out in contentment. Breathing into her, the slow exultation of being found in such contentment.

Oh.

She’s not _asking _for these, they’re not her memories to see at all, but they’re there, in her mind’s eye quite without permission. And now that she sees them…

Quite a lot of the Doctor’s recent memories are of Yaz.

There’s a lot of all four of them, of course. The Doctor has never been shy about how much she loves her “fam”. But it’s the differences that count. The Doctor doesn’t focus as much on Ryan’s smiles, or the way Graham gestures. There is memory after memory after memory of these, for Yaz.

And she can see them all.

Smiles and gestures and ‘reverse the polarity’; the times they’ve held hands and the moments they thought they’d lost each other. Memories of the times Yaz had walked out of the TARDIS doors, to return temporarily to her Earth life – the punch of sadness every time the doors closed. The fervent excitement for Yaz’s return.

She can even remember how the Doctor felt when they held hands for the first time – the pulsing of her heartbeats, the giddiness, the fear. There’s an even deeper memory – dark sheets and something forbidden, accidental that the Doctor couldn’t take back in the heat of the mo—

Whoa. Okay. No. That’s not for—

‘Yaz—!’ The Doctor sounds panicked, ashamed.

‘It’s fine, it’s fine, I didn’t watch, I didn’t watch,’ Yaz insists.

Detaching himself from Yaz, Ryan looks over at two of them like they’re mad. And maybe they are, just a little, for saying so much in this moment; saying so much with no confessions passed between them.

They are breathing in tandem, thinking in tandem. The Doctor’s body feels hot all over – _she _feels hot all over – like she’s a livewire set aflame by enlightenment. Ignorance was not bliss. It was never bliss. It kept her quiet when all that she wanted was just waiting to be released. For her seeing, not just in lieu of it.

She can’t verbalise her reaction properly. Not that she’d want to say it out loud. Not right now. But she hopes, she prays, that the Doctor can feel her feeling. Wrapped up tight and leaning into it.

Because – oh, dammit, if she can see the Doctor’s memories, then the Doctor can see hers.

_Yeah_, the Doctor responds, just a little tender, still, in her embarrassment._ Yeah, I can._

Yaz maybe wants to hide a little bit. She’s thought many thoughts she’s not proud of, but this isn’t regret. It’s downright embarrassment. The sheer _amount _of pining she has done in the time she’s been travelling with the Doctor is enough to scare anyone away.

Yaz has, apparently, been thinking the same things as the Doctor, focusing on the same images, if their shared memories are anything to go by. She knows there are too many memories of the way the Doctor smiles in the TARDIS – all soft, glowing and gorgeous. There are too many memories that the Doctor has to sort through now, knowing it is she who is the object of affection.

She still doesn’t want to let go.

They’re so close when they’re looking at each other like this. Yaz wants to say something. She wants to say nothing at all.

She thinks her hearts are doing it all for her.

‘Says we’re up in Vevera airspace, Doc,’ Graham relays dutifully, completely oblivious to the silent confessions happening next to him. ‘Surrounded by Mefa ships. Ain’t they the baddies? What the bleedin’ hell we doing there?’

‘The TARDIS weren’t there before,’ Ryan remembers. ‘We were on the ground.’ He frowns. ‘D’you think they moved it?’

The Doctor blinks. ‘_Her_, Ryan. The TARDIS is a _her_, thank you very much. Every time, honestly.’ Her attention turns to Yaz again, and when they’re this close, she doesn’t have to speak so loudly. ‘Are you alright to stand on your own?’

Yaz nods. She’s definitely stronger now – stronger than she thought she’d be when they first transported. When the Doctor lets go, she lets herself lean on the main console, but it doesn’t tire her out.

She’s doing okay. She looks up at the Doctor on her way to the other side of the main console – at her own face – and smiles.

She’s doing more than okay.

‘Is that what caused it? A relocation?’ Yaz asks, closing her eyes for a second. When she opens them again, her eyes lock onto the curves of her own face, the grin that is definitely not hers.

Two of them inhabit new bodies, but old roles still persist. Ryan, generally banned from pressing buttons, opts for his favourite place to hang onto the console deck. A place to stretch and reassess; comfort found in the familiar. ‘Who relocated i—her?’ he wonders.

There’s only one candidate, as far as Yaz is concerned. ‘The Mefa, maybe?’ she suggests with a shrug..

‘But why? We weren’t anywhere near ‘em,’ Graham says.

‘Maybe they knew we helped Plor out,’ Ryan responds.

All three of them look over to Yaz’s body, expectant. The Doctor’s nod is confirmation enough, non-committal in nature though it is. Working theories exist only when they work together; the Doctor may lead the pack but the deduction is most delicious when discovered by her friends.

_Codes. Signals and paths. Where did we go, my beautiful ship? Where did you go?_

It’s not just their thoughts and memories – their mannerisms are being translated through the mediums of each other’s bodies. Right now, the body of Yaz is twirling as the Doctor would, hands grabbing onto whatever she can find. Although it’s not as graceful as usual, there is no denying that this is the Doctor at her best. Right at home among the controls of her spaceship.

It dawns to her, then. There’s thousands of years’ worth of memories Yaz is suddenly privy to. A large portion of them have to include piloting the TARDIS.

_Good point!_ _If we need to use the console, you’ll be capable of flying the TARDIS with me. Oh, that’ll be fun!_

Eventually she stops at the screen next to Graham; new information is springing to life, from what Yaz can tell from Graham’s face. It’s crumpled in confusion. Must be Gallifreyan.

There’s more typing, more head-scratching. Yet it clearly doesn’t make sense to the Doctor. _But we’re – we’re miles away from the teleport. And our original co-ordinates were overridden too! How did you even find us? _Her thoughts are going at a mile a minute. Yaz can barely keep up. _It only makes sense that you’d find us through an object the TARDIS interface is, in some part, copied onto – nothing else but a pairing would be strong enough, even if it’s not pathic in nature__…_

But what sort of object?

_I don’t know. it had to be in my possession at the time of the—_

Enlightenment comes in mutuality. They are so in tandem, their thoughts coalesce. Silence envelopes the two of them, but sound is superfluous in the wake of this dawn.

Yaz digs into the pocket of the Doctor’s coat.

‘Are they bloody well telepathic too?’ Graham complains.

The pocket is surprisingly deep – _well, yes, it _is _Time Lord technology _– but in amongst the debris and the knick-knacks, she finds it; feels the cool Sheffield metal, the long, curved handle. When she brings it out, it glows intermittently.

‘Knew it,’ the Doctor gasps; her mouth hangs open. ‘She heard us. She saved us.’ The TARDIS thrums contentedly. One piece of the puzzle solved, then. ‘Exactly, Yaz! But not the other piece. Namely – why did she _have_ to?’

Ryan sighs. ‘I think they are, Granddad.’ He steps away from Yaz and looks towards the Doctor. ‘Can you let us in on this?’

The Doctor is back to circling the console again, pulling this and that. The TARDIS’ main crystal starts moving. Escape. The movement is sudden, a death-defying stunt that rips them from their vulnerability within the Mefa firing range.

And that’s a thought.

The TARDIS thrums with force in that moment – in response to a button, Yaz knows now – and it worsens the quiet ache between her ears. She hisses. Vulnerability is so much more manageable when it’s physical. Give her a flesh wound over this. Let her _fire_ the bell-ringers. It would give her much more peace. She can barely tolerate this.

She continues anyway, bringing up recent memory for a more recent desk. As the main crystal starts diving and soaring, Yaz stumbles around to the Doctor to pass her the sonic.

The Doctor stops Yaz from falling over. It’s her right arm that she uses, and Yaz’s concern must be written onto this pale face, this beautiful, open face. The wound still glistens; blood still oozes. But the Doctor does not care. She leaves no space between the two of them, placing her left hand on Yaz’s—her own—shoulder, and her right hand on Yaz’s—her own—cheek.

_What’s happening, Yaz?_

I’m okay, I think, is Yaz’s response – but it takes another five seconds for the Doctor to be sure of it, feeling around with only thoughts to assess the damage.

‘You doing alright, Yaz?’ Ryan asks quietly, placated when she nods confidently. He still frowns, ‘That’s so weird to say while you’re in this body.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Yaz mutters, watching her own body pull on controls like she knows them.

‘Seriously, Doc? Will you talk to us?’ snaps Graham, forced to clutch onto a railing.

‘Sorry!’ chirps Yaz’s voice. The Doctor spins around to face him, hands brought together in a single clap.

Yaz blinks. She doesn’t think she’s ever gestured that… cheerily. Shaking off the thought for now, she continues navigating while the Doctor wrestles with the evidence.

‘Finally,’ Ryan groans quietly. His knuckles wrapped around the console desk are paler than ever.

‘We’ve ascertained that the link between the sonic and the TARDIS gave her an indication as to where we were,’ the Doctor explains. ‘My connection to the TARDIS is largely telepathic and even that’s too weak for the TARDIS to haul four bodies of atoms around – especially for that distance. But d’you remember the time I stabilised the TARDIS on Desolation? Stabilisation and recall are quite similar, and both require a _lot_ of power and energy. The sonic has enough in it to make up the difference in energy between my telepathy and the TARDIS’ recall ability.’

Graham and Ryan appear to be following. Only just.

Around them, the TARDIS combines her travelling noises with a little pattern of bleeps. Yaz realises she can recognise them. Memories of telepathy in millennia past. Enough for a conversation or two. Enough, even, for an education.

She sounds happy. Yaz smiles up at the crystal and attempts to keep the travelling smooth. Away from the Mefa. Attempting to ignore the blossoming headache, from the whine leaking into her head. Attempting to defy, once again, forevermore.

‘So what does that mean?’ Ryan asks. ‘That ain’t all that happened, is it?’

The Doctor shakes her head. ‘No, see, because we need to find out why that were necessary. If all went according to plan—’

‘Which, to be honest, Doc, it never does,’ Graham interrupts.

‘A little faith, Graham, would be really appreciated!’ the Doctor tuts. ‘Anyway. If it had gone _right_... we’d be in the right bodies. And we wouldn’t be in Mefa territory— oh.’

She’s stock still now. Despite the bumpy journey. She’s stock still. All the world’s knowledge catching fire in her eyes now.

Yaz stills with the Doctor, eyes locking, keeping their thoughts on track.

‘Yaz, your memories,’ the Doctor murmurs, ‘of Plor.’

Yes, yes. With the whine stretching its lungs, the mire of memories gets murkier. It takes her a moment to focus, to recall the moment she felt the first sign of danger in that cave. When she saw duplicity fall away by nature.

‘There was...a hair patch. She were scratching at a hair patch.’ She has to screw her eyes shut. The mosquito whine grows louder.

‘Yes!’ the Doctor claps. ‘There it is. Brilliant Yaz, being brilliant as always.’

Yaz tries to smile back at her.

Graham’s arms are crossed from where he perches on the chair, sitting out the turbulence of the TARDIS travel. ‘What’s so different about that?’

Ryan sighs. ‘Vibas don’t have hair, mate, remember? She shouldn’t have had it.’

‘Exactly!’ The Doctor’s energy is infectious. She rubs at her temple as she walks around, eyes looking everywhere, nowhere, at the beginning and at the very end. ‘Yaz had spotted it just as Plor messed about with the code on the pedestal. Whatever she were typing – I think – no, it must have been switching the co-ordinates, it _must _have been—’

‘That she had to do it quickly,’ Yaz says. ‘Otherwise she’d have her cover blown—’

‘As a Mefa!’ the three humans conclude in unison.

The Doctor grins. ‘Which is why we landed in Mefa airspace, miles and _miles _away from the teleport, at completely different co-ordinates to where the TARDIS originally was.’ Another lever, another acknowledging going from the TARDIS. Conclusive and gospel. ‘She was going to deliver us right into Mefa hands. That wasn’t Plor. She were a spy.’

‘But we didn’t go there, ‘cause of the screwdriver, right?’ Even Graham is getting into the energy pouring off Yaz’s body currently. He attempts to stand up as he speaks, but another wave of turbulence hits the TARDIS, and he immediately crashes back onto the seat.

Yaz wishes she could join in the fun. This isn’t a mosquito whine anymore.

She searches, pleading, for the Doctor’s voice in her head to take notice again, but all the rest of them are caught up in the detection. Dog jaws closing around the vulpine – it’s hard not to feel the thrill of the kill.

Yaz can feel the canines dig into her throat, jugular puncture and jagged pushed in. Her brain is sinking into quicksand.

‘The TARDIS felt us go the wrong way, and came to save us,’ the Doctor finishes. ‘See! Told you she’s not just a ship.’ She beams, ‘Best. Ship. Ever.’

Ryan frowns. ‘That don’t tell us why you’ve got this... Freaky Friday thing going on, though, do it?’

‘I can only think it’s the side-effect of too much tampering with the original instructions. It’s not a young piece of equipment. I tried to run a few preliminary tests on it and, honestly, that box was not meant to hold anything more than 3 people. 4 people at a _push_. And d_efinitely_ not a Time Lord.’ The Doctor’s disregard appears on Yaz’s face not as a crumpled expression, but one of scorn. ‘So much for superior weaponry.’

‘We got locked onto it, though, didn’t we? That was part of it?’

‘Yes. Very good, Ryan! Good memory. So we didn’t have a choice. She did enough to lock us onto the box, but didn’t care enough about what the box could and couldn’t do.’

She can hear this grumbling, this growling, beckoned by the whining. They sing together in glee.

Heat is filling her palms. From pins and needles to a warmth too deep to be comfortable. It gets on her skin, under her, lacerating her bones and her focus. Yaz stumbles away from the TARDIS console and reaches out behind her for something to lean against. Anything.

‘Doctor...’

The grumbling is getting louder.

Flames are licking up her elbows, her shoulders. Breathing constricts. This is no attack. This is burning.

‘Well, that wouldn’t matter when you’ve just delivered the enemy to your bosses, eh?’

‘So the teleportation not only had to deal with a charge that was too big to take, but also an interrupted destination too. Oh, no wonder our atoms temporarily transferred! I’m surprised we didn’t dissolve right there and then! But no. Time Lord technology. TARDIS made sure we stayed in one piece even if we’d been... scrambled a little.’

The grumbling is a growl, then a shout.

Now a roar.

‘Doctor.’

So the bells toll. A deep, awful clanging, brazen brass with flames flickering round its edges. Still it echoes in her head.

‘Is it reversible?’

Everything... is starting to sound—

Underwater. And still the roar of it.

‘Uh. Definitely! Just need a little time, the co-ordinates of the teleport, and a whole lot of good luck. Then we should be fine.’

‘Yaz, you okay?’ she can hear Ryan’s worry.

Yaz collapses into the Doctor’s arms. Her own arms.

Her head back on cool metal, desperate fingertips searching for some sort of cool relief. Pressing her head so hard she makes dents in her skin. She needs – she needs relief.

Burning, burning. Her brain is boiling. Stretched to its limits, buckling under pressure.

Bell-ringers sound like death knells. Give her relief. Give her release. Even in this alien body, Yaz is only human. That is all she ever wanted to be.

She sees them. Doctor, she sees them.

Please, Allah, save her from this.

‘Yaz!’

Bursting, bursting, help her. She was going to travel with the Doctor for the rest of her life.

‘Information overload – thought it was,’ the Doctor hisses. She makes sure Yaz is safe on the floor, looked after by their friends, before she slams down a lever. The TARDIS jolts as it changes course, increases speed. ‘We’re going to see Plor.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay but imagine if a body swap happened on s12, imagine how much fun jodie mandip tosin and brad would have. @ chibs don't be a coward


	3. fix tonight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Thought I'd take a chance and throw out a Thasmin prompt. an accident involving a teleport and the TARDIS freaky fridayish but they have access to each other feelings and memories 😁**
> 
> featuring: angry!thirteen, plotting!thirteen, and a past come to haunt them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> once again, throughout this whole mini-fic, there are three songs you can switch between: ['so close'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcg1ubkAeo) and ['suspects'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVNI1dEO6Cc) from the broadchurch soundtrack; and ['closure'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZhMBH6eQj8) by vancouver sleep clinic.  
['suspects'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVNI1dEO6Cc) seems to work better for this part.
> 
> [all of these can be found on my spotify playlist for this fic.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5v8GPtBFpbISKEMKWbPoIb?si=KH0TVy20SaqqFpleTSu9xQ)
> 
> **the doctor's thoughts are in italic, unless the italics are within dialogue.**

She wakes up to flickering orange.

The lights are difficult to register. Masked half by shadow and half by her own fever, light and reality become disformed. Stretch it out and see how long the crystals will run; all ice cold and discomfort. Fingers of formation held together, physics’ discipline its first and last point of call.

But not for her. Reality bends. Her mind’s eye is rolling around on a broken-down ride, spinning teacups in perpetual motion, speeding up and slowing down with every new orbit.

No wonder, then, she crosses the lines of time.

In front of her, wispy figures pirouette around, people she was never meant to see.

Are they here, all of them? It’s her thought, but not all her voice. Susan? Ace? Rose? Bill? Come to help?

Fabrics and skin blend in with one another. The rollercoaster won’t stop. They won’t stop. Some of them take in the sight of the cave; the brave shadows, the rock formation, rusty red set alight. Some of them explore, feel the walls only to touch nothing. Some of them speak. Wordlessness in reality become whispers in the back of her mind, the back of her throat.

Her hearts are pounding. Make them real, Doctor, make them real again. Expel this bitter pain.

Why won’t they come to her? She carries them with her. Isn’t that enough? After all she’s _done?_

One of her own hands has been placed beneath her, her body on its side and her legs directed away from her. Recovery position. Right. It’s hard to think, hard to do anything much, with all these hearts’ ghosts ignoring her. Logic is so difficult to disentangle from the rest of her. Her conscience is the same as her hearts; her hearts the same as her conscience. Everything inextricable. She is everything because of everything else.

_How very human of us both_, she hears the Doctor think.

She can’t see her. Can’t find her.

But she has to speak, she has to sit up. Even when reality bends, Yaz recognises the need for it. Head burning, hearts boiling, she wills there to be strength in her muscles, to be air in her lungs. All survival depends on the very defiance of her situation. If reality is bending, then she will bend it back.

Is she back in the cave again? With the red dust and heightened blood. Everything depending on the dark of the light. Reaching back, exhausted outstretch, her hands come suddenly up to a cave wall. She taps it. Solid. Solid. Red. Good. She will lean back and let her spine cry out in relief. She lands with a quiet thud, spends the next ten seconds goading her legs into moving, to rest in front of her. Through the tear build-up on her eye’s horizons, she confirms a mission accomplished.

Still, the memories dance a cruel pirouette.

Brigadier. Clara. She may murmur it. Her hearts are everywhere. She sees them all.

Yaz smiles for her. She smiles, and cries. Loneliness, the slowest poison.

* * *

Consciousness is difficult when a mind implodes in slow-motion. Consciousness is different, too. Waking and sleeping are pointless, arbitrary concepts she can’t see any point in. The images are still the same. Light free of physics’ discipline, crystals beckoning memory, and pasts manifest. Taunt her with the words; she doesn’t care.

Manifest memory has a different feel to it; a different look. The wispiness is perceivable, a shimmering, but eyes are only one way into a person. Yaz looks at them and she sees the Doctor’s own grief, a cry that hurts soundlessly. It takes up her head, fans the flames, and all she can do is burn in it.

The deadliest poison.

They don’t speak; she speaks for them. But they watch. They have finally taken notice of her, as if they are no longer separate from their source. Watching these people watch her fuels the heat of the flames, but if she’s already burning alive then what’s the use of looking away? Sweat has pooled on her forehead and trickles down another path on her cheek. Saltwater and sweat. Moisture leave her.

Deadliest, she gasps again, in the middle of another’s speech pushed through her lips.

River, with the sad eyes. Every day she is further.

Curly hair and courage despite chaos. And a deep, deep longing. River opens her mouth to speak – but then the wisps are interrupted, and she spreads out into a cloud of blue memory, returning to a previous conversation three steps away.

Yaz sees herself.

Consciousness, in previous iterations, has prevented anger from carving so cruelly into her. In her own body, she was aware of just how much she should express. Responsibility comes at a personal price. Anger has always suffered to be responsible.

Irritation is a guide, sometimes, and deep injustice. Rage, however, is more alien. She views it as temptation, in a world that will not make enough change to justify it.

It is rage that paints her face now. Lights that weren’t glowing earlier, patched up despite years of disuse, shine a sonic orange, and it is this light that flickers across her clenched jaw, her set frown. Her gait is stiffened by it. In fever fury, Yaz is anything but herself. She would not recognise it were it not for the soundless indication, rustling somewhere in the very back of her mind, of its origin.

In fever boiling, Yaz takes relief from the Doctor’s stubbornness. Like cold metal providing relief against her own burning.

Blinking, she lets her head fall to the left, to follow whatever the Doctor is staring down. In this cave, it was the spider-form that they sought out; now the spider-alien is nowhere to be seen. Plor. Plor is nowhere to be seen. Something else moves, though – an intruder? The intruder stumbles back, talon-claws scraping the rust rock, two feet tripping over her own horror.

‘I didn’t know!’ she insists. The language coming out of her mandibles right now crafts English with a high-pitched clicking. ‘It wasn’t my fault!’

_The liar._

‘How?’ the Doctor responds. She keeps walking towards the alien, rage burning bright enough for the whole warring world. In her right pocket, the sonic’s handle peeks out. ‘Go on, enlighten me. How could it possibly be _our _fault?’

‘I didn’t know she—you were a Time Lord, I swear!’ The alien scratches at her arm again, at the place where the patch of hair was growing back. They’re clothed in a military uniform now, in a leather-like material, but the recollection is still searing. ‘I would have—I would have adjusted, tried to do something, tried to fix it, if I knew you were a Time Lord. Teleports—are—are—hard to come by, I need to know what species you are—and—and—and—you all looked human.’

‘_Don’t_,’ the Doctor snaps, ‘blame your teleport’s capabilities on _us_. I’ve read that coding; I know what it says. You should have thought about this earlier when you loaded four people onto a piece of technology that’s not equipped to deal with _one_ Time Lord, let alone a Time Lord and three humans!’

The wisps are curious. The wisps would have to be, Yaz thinks, for the Doctor to have taken any interest in their real selves. Gravitating, magnetised by the waves of rage choking up the area, they float towards her. Dead eyes catalogue every facet of Yaz’s body, from the unkempt space buns to the fists, the frenzied fists that clench then release, clench then release.

Lights dance. Ghosts circle. Death-knells, always death-knells.

The Doctor doesn’t see them, though. Her fury defines hearts. Staring straight ahead, eyes black as darkened stars, with the rage of one too.

An all the fear of one. The soundless motion is there again, panic weaponised. Yaz can see her grief, but so does the Doctor. She sees the future.

When the Doctor is terrified, the universe shudders.

‘You—you’re the ones who were touching—’

‘And who’s idea was that, Keinrekka? Hmm?’ the Doctor counters. ‘You locked us in. You didn’t care, did you? You didn’t care at _all_. When we were gone, we were gone. We’d be up on the Council’s ship, prisoners of war – and you’d be decorated. You didn’t care how we got there, just that we did.’ The alien flinches. ‘Yes, I know all about that. I know you rewrote the co-ordinates.’ The Doctor retrieves her sonic from her pocket. ‘Luckily for us, the co-ordinates you wrote over were enough to alert my TARDIS. We never went inside the mothership; it was _my _ship that heard my sonic and came to save us.’

Behind them, one of the lights breaks free of its rusty holdings. It crashes to the floor, glass shattering, and the world dims. Still, the recollections float.

‘By now, the Council must be starting to realise that their little plan hasn’t worked. Their fake Plor hasn’t appeared, and neither has your plan. Something’s gone wrong. What little faith they have in you must have blown away the second you failed to report back. It’s not been long, but it’s long enough for them, isn’t it?’

‘But you’ve come back. You’re here,’ the Mefa tries. She lifts her head up higher with the realisation. Pale grey skin illuminated by warm light. Fervour skyrocketing in stalagmites. ‘I can take you now.’

‘Oh, you can, can you?’ the Doctor responds. _Proper convincing, that. _Her brows ride up in astonishment. She exhales loudly, putting her sonic back in the jean pocket. ‘Do you really want to show them just how wrong it’s gone? Just two of the four, the other two nowhere to be seen – and one of the ones left is burning up _because she has a Time Lord’s mind in a human body!_’ The cave walls make echoes of the Doctor’s fear.

‘B-burning—’

The Doctor has reached Keinrekka now; the two of them stand parallel to where Yaz sits up against the wall. Quieter, she snarls, ‘No human is _ever _designed to have such a big brain in their own. Only Time Lords have the capacity, and there is _no one else _around to testify that but me. So _trust me _when I say your refusal will guarantee not only Yaz’s death, but your own too.’

Brilliant ginger hair. The most important woman in the universe. If Yaz blinks hard enough, she can see the wisps of her at the back of the group, a face so built to smile, a face having settled into something heart-wrenching.

Tear stains. Tear stains and please and no no no, and doctor, please, please don’t make me go back.

_Stop it, Yaz, stop it. Stop thinking it. Please._

The Doctor switches her gaze over to where Yaz sits, propped up against the wall, and there are tears in her eyes, too.

Keinrekka’s arms are on her chest now. Claws are starting to puncture the jacket. ‘What if I survive? They need soldiers. They would not kill me.’

It is the wrong thing to say. Stupid, stupid. The wrong thing.

The Doctor smiles.

Gesturing around the room, she asks, ‘Where’s my TARDIS, Keinrekka? Why isn’t it here? Best technology in the _entire _universe – and you had it within your reach. With a TARDIS you could properly condemn this planet once and for all. And where is it?’

‘I don’t—’

‘She’s travelling back in time,’ the Doctor responds, arms wide, glee brighter than any light, ‘to see someone we know very well. The _real _Plor. Not your cheap knock-off.’ The disgust curls Yaz’s lip into a snarl. ‘See, if she’s told that someone is using her face for the other side, she’s going to get really angry. And you don’t want a very angry Viba in your cave, do you? Especially a Viba that has had her face used to trick _the last surviving Time Lord in the universe_ into subordination.

‘How much are you willing to bet that present-day Plor isn’t on her way right now, to this very cave, to punish the enemy that used her face?’ The Doctor’s grin gets wider. ‘And imagine when she finds a _direct_ link to the Mefa mothership. The Council, right within her grasp. The glory of it. Mefa strategy would be annihilated in less than a day.

‘Forget a bungled teleport. Imagine what _that _would do to your reputation.’

Keinrekka stumbles on another rock rearing its head from the ground. The suggestion is enough. ‘You’re bluffing,’ she announces. ‘She wouldn’t. The risk is too much. I’d be gone, I’d be safe on the ship. She wouldn’t be able to get to me.’

Suddenly, the Doctor stands only a few inches away from the alien. Her eyes are level with Keinrekka’s, pinning them to the spot. Trapped her in the haze of the Doctor’s anger. The Mefa has no hope of moving – not ever moving again, if the Doctor did not permit it. Poison, laced with temptation, is the sweetest taste.

‘But I could,’ she retorts. ‘Plor would be just the beginning. If you manage to escape, by some extraordinary stroke of luck, then you’d be running for the rest of your life. Kill Yaz and you’d never forget it.

‘I can go anywhere in time and space. You can run to the darkest moment of the Universe and I will _always _be there. And that won’t be by coincidence. In case you’ve forgotten, _I’m _the one who wiped out my own people and ended the Time War. The Daleks call _me _the Oncoming Storm. I vanquished the Great Intelligence and I shackled the Family of Blood.’

Yaz’s hearts are pounding.

Quiet, now: ‘Imagine what I could do to you.’

Wisps recede in the aftermath; dust settling after the explosion.

Keinrekka is stiff. All of her hairs are on edge. Beyond perception of the Doctor, beyond even knowing how to look at her. Trapped in hate-fear haze, trapped in its consequences.

The Doctor storms away, stalking towards the cave room sheltering the teleport. She casts one single look back behind her – a furtive glance at Keinrekka. ‘Fix the code,’ she orders.

The command breaks all of the Mefa but her obedience. They leave Yaz alone in the cave mouth: alone with the bending lights, alone with the Doctor’s ghosts.

* * *

Consciousness is overrated; fear pumps through her whether she is awake or not. The figures feel her fear and reach out to her in her mind’s eye. Like they know. Like this cross-section between love and awe was normal for them.

The capabilities of a woman unleashed. And all of her consequence.

Yaz shivers.

* * *

_I’m so sorry._

* * *

Two or three more beads of sweat have escaped the curve of her forehead, now, and she trembles in bouts. She can hear herself speaking out loud, still, in bursts of recollection. All of these memories are tinged with frenzy. She will get loud and quiet, again. She does not hear the words themselves.

The roar of the flame is far too loud.

It sounds like agony.

* * *

Balancing on the line between states of consciousness, she feels herself be lifted. Supported just below her shoulders, an arm nestled behind the bend of her knees, she floats with eyes closed and her head lulling back. Rhythmic stomping keeps her tethered, waking up to a functioning perception of reality; the sound is joined by a quick typing, a nervous clicking. The typing stops, but the chattering continues.

She is placed gently on something cool and metal. Instantly bows her head to put her forehead against it. Gasps. Cool relief. Hope, hope, hiss at the roaring flames. The shock of metal silences death-knells.

She can feel someone stroking her hair.

It takes her a while to open her eyes, and a few seconds pass before they stay open. Looking up, she can see her own face, the anger and ache on the curves of her skull. The Doctor kneels on the black box beside Yaz, matching her fearful gaze, and the frenzy of her presence is dimmed by this apparent hope.

Yaz stares back at her. Wonders what she sees.

Wonders if all she sees are the dead.

She can hear Yaz’s thought, but the Doctor dares not respond.

‘I’ve inputted the right co-ordinates into the teleport. The fault in it should reverse the body swap it caused earlier,’ the Doctor says, and Yaz has never heard her voice rendered so flat out of so much emotion. ‘It’ll be over soon, Yaz. You’ll be alright.’

Yaz nods. The boiling is too much for the moment. She tenses as another wave of it rocks through her – wisps clouding her vision – and the Doctor squeezes her tighter.

_I’m so sorry._

‘We’re done,’ the intruder says, no small amount of fear in her voice. ‘Will you let me go after this?’

‘Yes,’ the Doctor promises. There’s nothing else to say, so no one tries.

The box starts vibrating once more. ‘I’m sorry,’ Keinrekka tries. ‘I’m sorry there was so much pain.’

_Are you sorry enough?_

But Yaz knows films are lies.

It gets hotter, and brighter, standing on the black box, hot enough to take her attention away from the burning in her own head. She’s not locked on, this time, but she won’t move, won’t do anything except hold on to the Doctor.

Brighter and brighter and brighter. Closer and closer and closer.

‘Oh, Keinrekka?’ the Doctor asks.

The Mefa looks up at the sound of her name. Confusion, written into desperation, wrecks the stoicism of her face.

She chitters. ‘Y-Yes?’

They can feel it, now, the building, the clawing at their atoms. The world is moving, thrumming, as the seconds count down. All Yaz can do is hold on. It is like agony.

‘I’m letting you go, but Plor won’t.’

It’s not even a snarl. And it’s somehow worse.

‘Run.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thirteen your ten is showing


	4. something real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Thought I'd take a chance and throw out a Thasmin prompt. an accident involving a teleport and the TARDIS freaky fridayish but they have access to each other feelings and memories 😁**
> 
> featuring: ryan falls over in his haste to fetch the doctor, yaz makes the doctor jump, and these two talk through some feelings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with this fic, ['so close'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rcg1ubkAeo), ['suspects'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVNI1dEO6Cc%22), and ['closure'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZhMBH6eQj8) are good songs to listen to - however for this final part i'd really recommend ['so far'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKy8dq06zjk%22), also on the broadchurch soundtrack. it more so encapsulates the more hopeful vibe of the piece than the others.  
  
[all of these can be found on my spotify playlist for this fic.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5v8GPtBFpbISKEMKWbPoIb?si=KH0TVy20SaqqFpleTSu9xQ)

She wakes up in her own bed on the TARDIS. It’s not a slow start, not filled with light streaming in through a window and bleary eyes blinking to adjust.

She springs up and sits, palms either side of her, mouth open like a scream. And she gasps the name, ‘Doctor,’ over and over again, until the room comes into focus. Blue, blue. Her pulse is erratic, a two-beat thumping in her chest. She registers, somewhere in her head, that they are only two beats, and relief floods her being.

‘Yaz,’ she hears to her right, and she turns her head to see Ryan, having been leaning on the doorframe, jump up into standing straight. His hands drift upwards on instinct, ready to help. His eyelids are low with exhaustion, but they widen at the sight of Yaz finally awake.

‘Doctor,’ Yaz pleads again, the only thing she knows right now. The only one she has known for a while. She needs her.

Ryan nods. ‘I’ll—I’ll get her,’ he promises, and dashes into a corridor. She can see his leg kick out as he trips, but there’s no loud thud to signal his body hitting the floor. He has it under control.

‘Doctor,’ she whispers again, her gaze drifting from the TARDIS corridor to the rest of her room. Blue, blue. She knows it now.

Soft cotton bunched into her fingertips, blue, blue. Little glitters embedded into the threads. A wooden wardrobe on the wall adjacent to her bed, opposite a white desk, and a chair with her police uniform draped over it. Facing her, white shelves cover the opposite wall, shaped around the ceiling’s slant. Some shelves have been gifted books, stacked neatly and sorted by alphabet. All of them to read and explore. Other shelves are adorned with sleek photo frames, ones Yaz had printed of her family, of her work friends. Most are new pictures, taken as a foursome on new planets; sunglasses and anoraks and huge, smiling faces. In each of them, Yaz is next to the Doctor.

The memories she has of these are overwritten by a buzzing sort of feeling, very quiet in the back of her head. Blinking, she searches for it, but nothing comes up. Just a notion of something else being there, a new perspective she can no longer see. But she has the feeling of it. The feeling of a feeling.

A memory of a memory.

Two spots on her temples ache like she’s drilled into them. She lets the blue fall into her lap, and she rubs at them, but little can be done. She thinks it’ll stick around for a while, this headache. But it’s preferable to the burning, the imploding of a brain too small to comprehend, even, the size of Time Lord’s.

The size of a Time Lord’s grief. It was too much, far too much. It burned her from the inside out. Searing despair and blackened regret. Over and over and over. Even two hearts were too few to hold it all.

Yaz wonders how the Doctor does not break, constantly.

Films lie, and heroes do not look at death to feel nothing. Two hearts older than a religion have cracked and broken ad nausea, and they are preparing to do so as long as the Doctor is alive. Yaz remembers knowing that for the first time; how it felt to know the Doctor grieves for people she doesn’t yet know. How bottomless her hearts seem to be, only to be rewarded with the same suffering in different presentations.

Yaz breaks for her. A sob threatens to break out. Loneliness, the slowest poison.

In the height of emotion, her pulse calls to attention a throbbing, a nasty pinch – she directs her head to focus on her right arm and she sees, once more, a wound. It’s wrapped up, white gauze bright above her darker brown skin, and it makes her smile. She knows her own wounds. She knows her own body. The relief, relief. She’s okay.

She’s okay, and not without consequences.

There’s a commotion to her right, and she turns her head again to see the Doctor come rushing in. Her heart flies.

Sleeves pushed up, crinkles of material dipping and rising like white waves. The burgundy red and rainbow stripes offset by mustard suspenders and deep blue. Blue, blue. Her blue. The Doctor looks ready to pounce, poised and ready to welcome Yaz home.

It is her face that Yaz has missed seeing most. Square in sculpture and round in feature; the wide nose and the perfectly formed chin, a jaw dropped in a half-aware moment of openness. There is light in those eyes, a quietly formed hope of reassurance; knowing that everything could still go wrong, as it has done countless times before.

The liberation flickering across her face when Yaz whispers once more – ‘Doctor.’

They have defied warring worlds and duplicitous allies and impossible circumstances for them both to be able to be here, to look at each other, and look at the other as whole. In one piece. Not entirely unbroken, not unchanged, but still whole. Still reaching out for each other for reassurance even though experience would demand otherwise.

Yaz will always reach out to the Doctor, just as she does now. ‘Doctor,’ she says again, and the sigh feels like a blessing, not a request.

The Doctor is at her side in a moment, engulfing her in a hug they both need. Heads fit onto shoulders the way they were always meant to; three hearts beating fast, but in accordance with one another. Harmonised, as if they remember when they were each other. The Doctor’s hands overlap on Yaz’s back, fingertips pressing points onto Yaz’s skin underneath her jumper, bodies returning to bodies’ comfort.

‘Yaz,’ the Doctor gasps, and her voice is thick.

Is she crying? Yaz starts to wait for the answer in her head, the disconnected voice once connected to her. The resulting silence is loud, but she dismisses it. It’s better. It’s better to have the Doctor here, back in her own body, her own mind, and in front of her.

‘You’re okay?’ the Time Lord asks. Yaz can feel it more than she can hear it.

And Yaz nods. If not right now, then she will be.

They pull apart slowly, the Doctor’s hands sliding apart until they rest on the sides of her ribcage. Her face is so close now – hazel green searching Yaz’s stare, looking once more for anything untoward. Her eyes are red. The worry etched onto her face devastates. This incarnation was not meant for such remorse.

Yaz sniffs. Tries to speak. Coughs. Eventually, she pushes a couple of words out of her throat. ‘The ghosts.’ There’s nothing else to add – everything, actually, to add. But there’s no language except thought that communicates what she needs.

‘I know,’ the Doctor nods, confirming Yaz’s fear. ‘I saw.’

‘You did? You saw my hallucination?’ It makes sense, after all, doesn’t it? Connected minds, after all. ‘You saw my thoughts.’

With lowered eyelids, a despondent stare, the Doctor pushes out air through her nose – short, sharp and knowing. ‘No. You saw mine,’ she reminds her. ‘I told you. I carry them with me, every day. I can’t ever forget them.’ She pauses, to allow a smile to take over temporarily. It’s the saddest smile Yaz has ever seen. ‘They don’t let me.’

Amazing people like that, Yaz thinks. No, she can’t imagine they would.

The Doctor sighs. ‘How are you feeling? No... burning?’

‘Just a headache,’ Yaz dutifully relays.

‘That’ll go,’ the Doctor says. ‘And your arm?’ She lets go to let her hand traverse across the underside of Yaz’s elbow; to the side of Yaz’s forearm, fingertips stroking where the gauze obscures Yaz’s wound from sight. ‘Not too bad?’

Yaz shakes her head. ‘Just a dull pain.’

‘Good! You’ll be right as rain soon enough, Yasmin Khan. Up before you know it.’ The smile, this time, is not as distraught, but sadness is a scent no living being can ever truly shake off. ‘Best if you stay asleep for a while though. Having someone else’s brain inside your own would knock anyone out for a good day.’

Yaz frowns. ‘How long have I been out?’

‘Three hours,’ comes Graham’s voice.

Yaz is surprised to see him and Ryan gathered at the doorframe, anxiousness making work of their little movements. Ryan taps his foot. Graham’s folded arms never stay still.

‘We’ve been checking up on you,’ Ryan adds, ‘in shifts. Making sure you’re okay.’

The Doctor looks at them both. ‘And we’ll do the same again.’ Now to Yaz, she adds, ‘You need to rest a bit more. You can get up when the headache’s gone, but until then my medical advice is to get some bedrest. Just so we’re certain you’re alright.’

She knows not to argue. The Doctor starts moving, the duvet rustling beneath her ministrations, but Yaz holds onto her tighter. Her attention caught; the Doctor looks back.

‘I just wanted – I want to say thank you,’ Yaz rushes. ‘I’d be dead without you going to Keinrekka. So. Thank you.’

It’s a half-smile now, a smile that doesn’t believe itself. Her hands linger but the Doctor puts distance between them. She swallows. ‘Of course,’ and of all the reply given, it’s only that that Yaz believes.

* * *

She assumes that everyone has gone to bed now. But she’s sick of hers, sick of the motionless and the distance away from everyone. Bedridden for so long, on legs returned to her she has not yet stood on, her balance is off – way off – and she almost falls. But she catches herself, rights herself, and gets the feel of the ground beneath her once again. Toes dig into the beige rug beneath her, black socks against the brown, and she grounds herself in the familiar feeling before breathing in and setting off.

She’s still in her clothes, she realises. Makes sense; would’ve been hard to undress her without waking her up, and who, of all of them, would have been prepared to do that?

Immediately, the memory of the Doctor’s memories comes to the fore – the Doctor watching her, appreciating her. All the times Yaz guessed and second-guessed a moment only to discover later that the Doctor was doing the exact same thing. That recognition of the Doctor’s feeling; the Doctor to keeping her distance, half out of respect and half out of fear.

Falling in love again. More grief.

It’s a difficult thought, but an inevitability when being a Time Lord, Yaz supposes. Even when the Doctor has felt the most jaded, she’s discovered, she knows it comes with an undercurrent of despair – a rage of this being her lot in life, to love and to fail and to lose. Being in the present, however that appears to a Time Lord, becomes the priority of her entire existence.

Be in the present, Doctor, she thinks, forgetting for a moment that the Doctor can no longer hear.

Her socks dim the sound of her footsteps on the TARDIS floors; she travels through corridors, walking without notice, towards the console room. She is almost floating. Ghosts fill her head again, and she remembers how they looked so bright against the half-light. In the back of her mind, she feels them, hears them; but, they, too, are just memories now, not hallucinations. She can’t carry them in her heart like the Doctor does in hers, but she feels them still.

In her own way, she loves them too. All of these brilliant, brilliant people she was never meant to know.

Yet knowing them has been a privilege.

The thought makes her smile.

She gravitated towards the control room in order to get some thinking space. Faced with the sight of the glorious main crystal, she is relieved to be reunited again, breathing out something between a smile and a laugh. The TARDIS’ movements are loudest here in this room, and it makes her feel a little more at peace. Being in the Doctor’s head has ladled onto her even more appreciation for this ship; this flying beauty that Yaz is constantly in awe of. The rhythmic thrumming makes her feel less alone, alone in this room as she is. The soft orange light and the quiet _vworps _calm her.

The TARDIS layers an arpeggio to the little beeps and sounds echoing throughout the room, and Yaz smiles into the room, pleased the TARDIS is pleased with her too.

But, of course, she is not alone. A sound catches her ears, and she stops moving. She can hear movement: a swinging if she stays absolutely still; a soft clinking if she keeps walking. She can’t see the Doctor, though. Not on this platform, anyway.

It’s only peering through the light-darkness of the room that she can see the Doctor kneeling off to the far side of the interior, working on one of the hexagons on the wall. A whole bunch of wiring has burst out in a clump; she picks relentlessly at the different cables, goggles on her head and sonic in her right hand.

Yaz tiptoes over – only when she nears the Time Lord does she recognise the clenched jaw, the slight furrow of her brow. Strands of her hair fall down her face like blonde daggers. Yaz folds her arms.

‘Doctor,’ Yaz announces.

She jumps. The shock makes her press the button on her sonic and it buzzes, setting a spark alight on the cable in her left hand. She quickly snuffs it out, then switches her attention to Yaz.

‘Honestly,’ the Doctor tuts, but there’s no weight to the admonishment at all. ‘You free of your headache now?’

‘Yeah.’ Yaz continues padding over to the Time Lord. She doesn’t ask whether she can join; she doesn’t think the Doctor’s answer would be any help to either of them. She plonks herself down next to her and waits for a dismissal that never comes. ‘How are you doing?’

‘I’m alright,’ is the Doctor’s brusque reply. ‘The TARDIS needed checking, you know. Especially after a teleport like that. Two, even! Frankly, I’d be more surprised if she hadn’t been damaged in some way.’

The TARDIS makes a sound of displeasure in response.

‘Oi, you. Of course I know you’ve survived a lot worse than this,’ the Doctor responds to the ship. ‘Why would I choose you otherwise?’

The sound that fills the room is more light-hearted, this time, a trilling sound. Yaz can’t understand it anymore, not like she could when she had the Doctor’s mind in her own; she knows enough, though, for it to make her grin.

‘Yes, alright, you chose me,’ the Doctor grumbles, her upper lip raised in a dramatic show of near disgruntlement. She returns to her work, barely able to look at Yaz.

And it’s not like Yaz doesn’t notice. ‘Doctor,’ she says, ‘I know something’s on your mind.’ A pause. ‘You can’t use our lack of...telepathy to hide it.’

She gets a huff in return.

Yaz tightens her crossed arms. ‘Doctor, please.’

Part of her wishes to hear what the Doctor is thinking. Acres and acres of rumination occur in that brilliant mind every second; there are depths to it that Yaz couldn’t understand even when they were connected. It brought home to her just how unreachable the Doctor could be; how many lightyears ahead she would always be. But, she supposes, that is the case with every person she will ever meet. Depths unknown. Bridging the gap requires reaching out.

Yaz wants desperately to bridge it. Even if it takes her whole life.

Two, three, four cables are inspected before the Doctor finally releases the bundle from her hands. Takes a breath. Looks up to the waiting Yaz. There is no fire in her eyes now, just resignation; the sticks on which her feet will stand are waiting to be lit – in another time, against another danger.

‘How are you not terrified of me?’ the Doctor wonders.

Yaz blinks. ‘What?’

‘You saw me,’ the Doctor responds. ‘You saw how I was with Keinrekka. You saw me in your head. The Oncoming Storm. This isn’t what I promised you at all. I said I couldn’t guarantee your safety but how can you travel with me if I can’t even keep you safe from me? How does that not scare you?’

Yaz hasn’t been asleep as much as sifting through her thoughts. Emotions, recollections and reactions; they are tough to go up against. Even tougher when up against these sorts of situations.

She should – and does – view being kept so in the dark as a betrayal. Knowing someone is never really knowing someone, not properly. Hearts are unknown depths humanity has uncovered so little of.

Truthfully, she _is _scared of the Doctor.

The universe trembles when she is angry. It cries when she is furious. Few things can bring the Doctor back down to normality again, not when she is so driven by the pain that fuels her. Like Missy and the Master, the Doctor’s capabilities can force hell on those who do not ask for it, never mind those who do. Fully unleashed, the Time Lord Victorious, there is no unknowable depth others will ever discover again.

‘Who said I wasn’t?’ Yaz answers, and the Doctor’s face falls further.

She busies her hands, her attention, with the cables again. Tangling her fingers through them, making a mess of a mess. ‘Then why are you here?’ The Doctor’s voice is flat. This time, completely devoid of emotion.

So the walls climb. Yaz rushes now, rushes to prevent them. ‘Because it’s not enough to stop me,’ she says. ‘Doctor, how can you think that’s all you are?’

The Doctor’s hands stop moving.

‘I know you like to punish yourself for it, but –’ Yaz searches for the right words. ‘It isn’t all you are. You’re different things to different people and that’s how people _work_. You wouldn’t _be _a person otherwise.’

The Doctor still doesn’t respond. But she doesn’t start moving again, either.

‘Your previous incarnation...he—he tasked you to a new mantra, right?’ Yaz racks her brain for the memory of the memory, the feeling of the words echoing in her head. ‘Never be cruel...’

‘Never be cowardly,’ the Doctor saves her from the trouble. ‘Always try to be nice and never fail to be kind.’ Her eyes light up as she alights on the recollection. ‘Never eat pears.’

‘I like pears. Not quite sure that last one was a good idea.’

‘Excuse you. Pears are rubbish,’ the Doctor contests, and a smile flickers across her face again.

Yaz laughs. She can see the Doctor’s smile elongate, then, at the sound; caught up in it. Yaz’s pulse quickens.

She takes a deep breath and settles down. ‘Okay, aside from the pears. They’re good words, wise words. You definitely had something good there.’ She pauses. ‘And you do honour them, you know. You try. It doesn’t matter that you couldn’t do it, then. The point is, you try.

‘And never mind that, you did it for a good reason.’

The Doctor looks down, away from Yaz. ‘I didn’t want you to become like Donna,’ she admits.

Yaz takes the opportunity to move closer to her, dragging her bum across the floor in quick movements. The Doctor notices; moves closer to the floor herself to accommodate. Next to her, feeling each other’s presence, is as reassuring now as it was before the entire debacle. If not more so.

‘I know,’ Yaz says, because she does, she did back then. She knows the personal stake the Doctor had in it, even without Yaz’s involvement. ‘Have you seen her since?’

‘Only as a ghost.’ She wears an empty smile.

Yaz nods, lets the statement fill the air between them for the moment. There’s so much she wants to say to the Doctor – always – but decoding her own feelings is never easy.

Orange light offset by shadows; shapes appear darker and deeper on the Doctor’s face. ‘I could have been nice,’ she insists. ‘But I wasn’t. I just let my fear and my anger intimidate her.’

‘Sometimes people don’t want _nice_,’ is the answer she gets. ‘I mean, you must know that more than anyone. The universe isn’t all that nice, is it? There’s war and death and greed, everywhere. It’s not just a human thing to refuse niceness, is it?’

‘Definitely not.’ Yaz hates that the Doctor sounds so weathered. ‘D’you know what happens to the Mefa and the Viba, in the end?’

Yaz shakes her head.

‘They die, all of them. No one survives. Three thousand years, and they drive each other to annihilation. The Viba didn’t even ask for it, but four hundred years in, about the time we were there, and they’re as bad as the Mefa. Fighting dirty just to die.’

Yaz’s heart drops. The silence, a vigil for future grief, unravels slowly.

‘Can’t anyone be saved?’ she eventually whispers.

‘No. No.’ The Doctor rests her head on a palm, staring off into the TARDIS corridor. ‘The end of it becomes a fixed point in time, largely because it’s absorbed into the home galaxy’s consciousness. The Pointless War, it’s called. ‘Mefa’ becomes the word, in twenty-three different languages, for ‘futile’.’ She looks at Yaz. ‘And ‘Viba’ becomes the word for ‘unconsidered’.’

Yaz remembers Plor, then – fake Plor, she reminds herself – saying something like that. Madness, she thinks, how a single word becomes so eponymous of an entire extinction. An entire futility.

She takes a gamble. Yaz unfolds her arms and reaches out; she finds a welcoming space, between the Doctor’s left bicep and her side, and wriggles her right hand through. The pressure of the Doctor’s body around her limb is an immediate comfort. They sigh out in unison.

‘And Keinrekka?’ she wonders.

The Doctor shrugs. ‘I don’t know. The bit about Plor was a lie, by the way. Plor never knew. I was more worried about the Council’s response. They probably would’ve shot her on sight,’ she frowns.

‘See!’ Yaz cries. ‘Okay, so, you made Keinrekka fix the code against her will. You got angry with her. But she wouldn’t have listened to _nice_, Doctor, and you know that. We both saw what she was like. Your anger was justified.

‘Plus, you gave her a chance to run. You weren’t nice, but you chose to be kind. You knew the danger she’d be in because things didn’t go according to plan for her, and instead of letting her be shot, you gave her an excuse to escape. That was kind, Doctor, even though were furious, even though you were pained.’ Yaz squeezes the arm she’s holding. ‘You gave her hope.’

She doesn’t expect the Doctor to respond to it. These are words the Doctor needs to process in her own time, away from Yaz; she needs to reconcile with herself even as the film that rolls in front of her eyes is tinged blue with her own regret. Anger is a poison that best healed by distance. That healing can’t come until later.

Yaz can only hope the Doctor has started the process.

The TARDIS’ thrumming keeps them in a comfortable calm as the seconds pass.

She watches the Doctor resume her twiddling of the different cables for a minute or two, before she lays her head on the Doctor’s shoulder. The mustard suspender makes the landing a bit bumpier than expected, but it’s a sacrifice Yaz is willing to make in order to get close to the Time Lord.

This woman, this extraordinary woman, she thinks in the quiet. The TARDIS chimes in agreement. Flawed and grieving and learning to love yet again.

After a few minutes, the Doctor angles her head to the side, comfortably pressed up against Yaz’s head. They stay like that for a short while, breathing slow, in time and all-considered. The slow exultation of seeing and being seen; being found in such contentment.

It is only interrupted by the Doctor taking Yaz’s hand on her arm, entwining it with her right hand, and bringing the clasped hands to kiss Yaz’s knuckles. Each one, done with a breath in between.

The importance of all of it, Yaz thinks. The importance of the in between.

‘Thank you, Yaz,’ the Doctor murmurs.

In truth, she’d been drifting slowly to sleep in the moments before. The Doctor’s movements had woken her. This isn’t something that escapes the Doctor, Yaz knows, from the way she’s looking at her.

She has to sleep again. She knows the Doctor doesn’t sleep much – those memories, that blacking out and the passing of time – were few and far between when Yaz could access her memories; and if she’s honest, it doesn’t surprise her. Still, it’s been a long day for the both of them.

The Doctor lets go of her hand for her to stretch; it’s such a wonder to do so in her own body, to know the limbs much more intimately. The stretch is heavenly, and all of a sudden her body is calling out for bed again.

Yaz can’t refuse it. She stands up, slowly, ungracefully, much to the amusement of the Time Lord. She makes a face at the Doctor, but her heart’s not really in it. It’s speeding up, a confidence forming against the panic nestled within her heart.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ the Doctor says. Her hands have already enclosed around the cables, the sonic picked up. No sign of retirement, then.

But thoughts were heard, and memories spoken; things Yaz can’t forget about the Doctor. Things she _doesn’t _want to forget.

Yaz takes the plunge regardless. ‘You can join me afterwards.’ She takes in a breath, a little trembly. ‘If you like.’

‘Alright.’ The smile returned is softer than she’s seen in a while. Orange light reminding her of the cave, of the hands they held on the journey to it. The Doctor had her hand, then; her heart, always. Yaz lingers for a moment before returning once again to her bedroom. Every step is a beckoning towards crossing that bridge.

* * *

Later, much later, in the night, she is asleep. Her subconscious detects a body coming to rest next to hers. Never quite restless nor still; she simply lays there.

To be the considered; to defy the fear of grief. Yaz takes her hand and she cherishes it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's love, bitch


End file.
